An essential collection of Judaica that ably combines the known and the obscure.
The sixth book in an anthology series about Jewish history and culture that covers the years 1750 to 1880.
The latest volume, edited by Carlebach—a professor of Jewish history, culture, and society and director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University—contains a wide range of material by and about major Jewish figures of the era, including autobiographical excerpts, poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing. Authors include well-known figures, such as Karl Marx, and lesser-known ones, such as socialite and poet Rebecca Franks, known as the “Jewish Belle” of Philadelphia. Sections devoted to visual and material culture include images of finials on the rolls that hold Torah scrolls, a stylized topographic map of Israel by scribe and illustrator Moses Ganbash, and paintings such as one depicting a Jewish burial society from the late 1700s. Also included are excerpts from sheet music, such as that for Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Ancienne melodie de la synagogue from 1844. Even those who are well versed in the time period will learn much from these pages, which include a wide range of material, from an epistle that expresses opposition to Hasidism, penned by scholar Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, to a piece on bare-knuckle boxing by an Englishman known as “Mendoza the Jew.” The greatest takeaways from the work involve questions that readers may not have considered; for example, just how did a soldier go about celebrating Passover in the middle of the Civil War, as a Union Army private set out to do in 1862? An account from American Mordecai Sheftall, who was captured by the British in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, is brief but highly engaging. Other, more well-known sources don’t have the same enlightening appeal; for instance, excerpts from the work of Benjamin Disraeli prove relatively dry, with familiar statements, such as how “the fitness of a material object for a material purpose is a test of its utility.” Images of items such as an amulet made to protect pregnant women from Lilith, Adam’s first wife in biblical lore, create more lasting states of wonder.
An essential collection of Judaica that ably combines the known and the obscure.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-19000-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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